Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

We now have the first decision from a court of appeals on the NSA’s mass surveillance program involving bulk collection of telephone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and it’s a doozy. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued anopinion inACLU v. Clapper holding that the NSA’s telephone records program went far beyond what Congress authorized when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act in 2001. The court completely rejected the government’s secret reinterpretation of Section 215 that has served as the basis for the telephone records collection program.

When is a government rule not a rule? Making that question difficult, when it should be simple, seems to be the government’s leading strategy in a hearing this week in Twitter Inc.’s lawsuit challenging the government’s squelching of its transparency report. Twitter wants to provide a closer look at how often federal agents are demanding private user data for surveillance, and part of its suit fights back against the government's rules on what it can and cannot publish. But the Justice Department has asked a federal judge in Oakland to dismiss portions of Twitter’s lawsuit because, it says, the rules the government cited in denying Twitter the ability to be more transparent aren’t really rules. They’re more like guidelines, the agency says. If you’re having flashbacks about ''Pirates of the Caribbean'' and a certain Captain Barbossa, you’re not alone. More on that later.

A bipartisan group of congressional leaders has reintroduced the USA Freedom Act. The bill is an attempt to rein in the intelligence community's "Collect It All" strategy, and passing USA Freedom is a first, small step in the right direction. However, it has serious faults that should be addressed.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in 2004 to serve as central authority for intelligence activities in the United States. To illustrate its mission, several years ago the agency created a poster outlining a series of eight goals that the agency believed would lead to "the most insightful intelligence possible."

Unfortunately, this list of goals, which is still in use today, does not include language related to privacy, civil liberties, or the Constitution.

So what if the ODNI's official mission statement reflected the ideals of a free society as opposed to just the goals of a spy network? Here's our rewrite, with the underlined text representing our proposed additions to the text: